


Four Tales: A Wasteland Anthology

by SynthApostate



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Bonding, Friendship, Gen, Ghost Stories, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 23:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13646349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SynthApostate/pseuds/SynthApostate
Summary: A dark night. A campfire. There's no better time for swapping spooky stories with your friends.





	1. A Campfire Beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moon_crater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_crater/gifts).



> Another story for the [Post-War folklore prompt](https://newfalloutkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1168.html?thread=138384#cmt138384) on the new Fallout kink meme. I swear I write stuff for people other than Moon. Really! I do. Her prompts are just so... _open_.
> 
> Warnings: canon-typical problematic language and attitudes, mostly toward mental illness; mild gore; implied suicide; senile dementia

A coyote howls somewhere in the distance. The sky is spangled with stars and a sliver of moon. There’s a campfire. This is the Mojave, where a fire can be seen from miles away, a friendly beacon in the dark. But it doesn’t feel that way from the four makeshift seats around the fire. The light doesn’t reach as far as it should. It’s like the night has swallowed them.  
  
The four soldiers—Razz, Poindexter, O’Hanrahan, and Mags—are half a day’s march from base. They’re on routine maneuvers, a test of their ability to survive a single night in the desert unsupervised. It wouldn’t be a challenge for most squads, but the Misfits? There’s a betting pool at Camp Golf. Three to one odds they’ll never be heard from again. But that just means they have something to prove.  
  
One of them should be on watch. The other three should be asleep. But no one wants to move from the fireside.  
  
“If we were camping back home, this’d be a good time to start tellin’ scary stories,” O’Hanrahan says. The others regard him with varying levels of interest, from lukewarm to cool.  
  
“You mean like the hook-hand killer that escaped from the crazy house?” Razz asks.  
  
“What the heck’s a crazy house?”  
  
“You know, the nuthatch. The place where they locked up murderers and shit, before the war." In spite of himself, he warms to the topic. "You never heard about places like that? All the best stories start there.”


	2. Razz: Hook-Hand

It was right before the Big One. Vault-Tec was throwing people in the vaults, all the scientists and important assholes they wanted to survive, and I guess some regular people so the science guys would have someone to torture. There was one vault up in the Holy Wood Hills where they put all the really important people, like Vince Natali and Claire Redelle. People so important we still remember their names today.  
  
But there was one guy who wasn’t supposed to be there. All the science guys showed up in their fancy lab coats and shit, but they didn’t know that the last member of their team was lying dead in a ditch outside the crazy house, because one of the prisoners escaped, killed the poor dumb fuck, and stole his clothes so he could blend in. And that’s who got into the vault right before the bombs dropped.  
  
For a while, he kept quiet. But then people started having “accidents.” The vault doctor gave a patient psycho instead of med-x and got his head bashed in, and the patient died of an overdose right after. Nobody knew how the chems got labeled wrong. An engineer got burned to a crisp in the reactor. They figured maybe he fell in or something. And the vault cook? Accidentally chopped his own arm off with a meat cleaver and bled to death. Weird, right?  
  
But soon there were only a few people left alive, and the killer knew the ones who were left had nowhere to escape to. So he went to the armory and picked up a harpoon gun. After that, there was no chance for escape.  
  
If you went off alone somewhere in this vault, he’d be there waiting in the shadows. You let your guard down for a minute? Bam! Harpoon! Lock yourself in your room and fall asleep? BAM! Harpoon! Bed down with that science guy you thought you could trust? Harpoon, motherfucker!  
  
One girl almost got away from him. She got in a closet, and when he tried to reach in and grab her, she slammed the door on his hand. Broke it off at the wrist. Vault doors do that.  
  
So he put a harpoon where his hand used to be. That’s why he’s called Hook-Hand. And he cut the power so she couldn’t get out. And he kept walking by, scraping his hook against the door, over and over, until she finally went crazy from the sound and died. He scared her to death.  
  
When there were no more victims in the vault, Hook-Hand opened the vault door and went out into the wasteland in search of more people to kill.  
  
That was over two hundred years ago, so Hook-Hand must be dead and gone by now. Right?  
  
But some say he left the vault too soon, before the radiation levels went down. Some say he got turned into a ghoul, and stalks the wasteland to this day looking for fresh victims. Others say he ran into the Master and got turned into a nightkin, and now he wanders the desert completely invisible. By the time you see him, it’s too late. And some say... _look out, he’s right behind you!_


	3. Campfire Interlude

Razz falls back with a look of horror, pointing straight at O’Hanrahan.  
  
O’Hanrahan waits politely for him to continue.  
  
“He’s right...behind...” Razz’s arm drops. “Goddammit, O’Hanrahan.”  
  
“Did I do something wrong?”  
  
“Don’t mind him. He’s just mad he didn’t scare you,” Mags says, with an unmistakable twinkle of humor.  
  
“Oh, I’m sorry. It was a scary story.  _Real_  scary,” O’Hanrahan says earnestly. “Only, why was he called Hook-Hand? Wouldn’t Harpoon-Hand be more like it?”  
  
“Harpoons are hooked at the end. Well, some of them are.”  
  
“But why would a vault have a harpoon gun, anyway?” asks Poindexter.  
  
“Hell,  _I_  don’t know. I didn’t stock their weapons. I’d have given them a lot more firepower, if it was up to me.”  
  
“I think your story may have a few logical inconsistencies.”  
  
“Oh, fuck your logical inconsistencies! Why don’t you tell a better story, if you’re so smart.”  
  
“Very well.” Poindexter pauses in thought, and then says simply, “It begins with a murder.”


	4. Poindexter: Not a Breath

Carlo was an utterly unremarkable man, who served drinks in an unremarkable saloon in a rough collection of shacks almost ambitious enough to consider itself a town. By all rights, he should have lived and died on that same patch of dirt and passed instantly out of memory the instant he did so. In fact, the only remarkable thing he ever did was to be shot by the notorious gunslinger Nine-Lives Slade. And, since he was dead before he hit the floor, he certainly didn’t have time to get any enjoyment out of that.  
  
Nine-Lives, dead drunk and in a towering rage, fired six shots into Carlo’s chest, having mistaken the bartender for the gentleman who absconded with his paramour. Nine-Lives then staggered out into the hills to sleep it off.  
  
When he returned, Carlo was already buried in the cemetery outside of town. And for the first time in some forty years, his name was on everyone’s lips. The new bartender, a young lady named Jen who had been witness to the rather one-sided altercation a few days prior, made certain to bring Nine-Lives into the conversation.  
  
Nine-Lives was a product of the wasteland. Death was his business. He had been shot eight times, and lived to collect the bounties on each of his would-be killers, and dozens more besides. Perhaps he did regret murdering an innocent man, but it wouldn’t be good business to admit to it. After all, no one would hire an assassin with a reputation for a soft heart.  
  
So Nine-Lives told the girl, in a voice calculated for all to hear, “I shot that lily-livered milksop, and I’d do it again, too. The only thing I’m sorry for is wasting my bullets. If he was here right now, I’d plant a knife in his heart.”  
  
“Why don’t you, then?” Jen asked him. “We buried him not far from here. If you were right to kill him, you can go to the graveyard tonight and stick your knife in his grave. But if he was unjustly murdered, his spirit might not be at rest. He might reach up through the ground and pull you in after him.”  
  
Nine-Lives declared that he didn’t believe in ghosts, and that he was willing to put the knife in the grave then and there. But Jen told him that if he wasn’t a lily-livered coward himself, he’d better wait and do it at midnight, and she’d go in the morning to make sure he’d followed through.  
  
Despite his bravado, Nine-Lives was somewhat less than enthusiastic about the whole idea. Even a man who doesn’t believe in ghosts can lose his nerve in a graveyard, especially in regards to the grave of a man he’s wronged. So the gunslinger consumed sufficient whiskey to fortify his courage. And as night fell, and the sky grew blacker, and the air grew cold and still, greater amounts of fortification were required.  
  
Finally, not long before midnight, Nine-Lives set out, knife in hand. Alone, by the light of the moon, he approached the freshest grave, marked by a simple piece of mutwood.  
  
No one knows exactly what he said to Carlo as he knelt there by the marker. It is known that he raised his knife high, and plunged it deep into the fresh-turned earth.  
  
If he was expecting a hand as cold as death to reach up and grab him by the wrist, well, it wouldn’t be at all accurate to say that he was disappointed, but certainly his expectations were overturned. With a feeling of great relief, he started to rise and make the walk back into town.  
  
And that was when he found that he couldn’t move. He was held fast to the grave.  
  
In the morning, Jen entered the graveyard to find the gunslinger lying across Carlo’s grave with a look of terror on his face and his own knife stuck through the tail of his coat, pinning him to the ground.  
  
Any observer would have said that a gust of wind must have blown the garment, unnoticed, into the path of the blade. Clearly the killer’s imagination had run away with him, and there was no vengeful ghost involved.  
  
But Jen, who had been awake and pacing the dusty main street from midnight to dawn, could have testified that night had been perfectly still, with not a breath of wind.


	5. Campfire Interlude

“Creepy,” Razz says unwillingly. “I think you could have told it in about half as many words, though. And ‘lily-livered milksop’? Who talks like that?”  
  
“If you’d like to help me improve my ‘tough guy’ vocabulary, I’m open to suggestions.”  
  
“Nope,” Mags cuts in. “Don’t you dare encourage him to swear. Let me at least pretend I’m enforcing military discipline out here.”  
  
“Is it really possible to die of fright?” O’Hanrahan asks.  
  
“I doubt it,” says Mags. “Especially with these guys and their weak-ass storytelling. You have nothing to worry about.”  
  
“I ain’t afeared. I was just wonderin’ since it happened in both their stories.”  
  
“He ‘ain’t afeared,’” Poindexter says to Razz.  
  
“I guess you couldn’t get him, either. Maybe he’s un-scare-able.”  
  
“Maybe Mags should give it a shot,” Poindexter says, with the smugness of someone who feels he’s already won what no one even knew was a competition.  
  
“Yeah, Mags,” Razz says, “let’s see you scare the hick.”  
  
“That’s a strange benchmark for success, but okay.” She winks at O’Hanrahan. “Remember, farmer boy, I’m your squad leader.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am! Preparin’ to be scared, ma’am!”  
  
Razz and Poindexter both boo the lousy joke, but they quiet down when Mags is ready to speak.  
  
“You’ve seen mirrors before. Everyone has. But have you ever wondered why you never see any intact ones?”  
  
“Because most of them were damaged in the war, and the survivors lacked the knowledge and resources to manufacture new ones,” says Poindexter. Mags lets out an exaggerated sigh.  
  
“Do you want the fucking story, or not?”


	6. Mags: Moldering Molly

Back in Reno, there used to be a girl named Molly Caslet. She was very beautiful, with long black hair and a flawless face, and she was also very vain. She had the only full-length mirror in town, and she would stand in front of it for hours on end, admiring herself.  
  
On Molly’s seventeenth birthday, she invited some friends to spend the night. Girls used to play a game in those days, back when there were mirrors to play it with, where they would light a single candle and stand in front of a mirror...and if they waited long enough, the face of the person they were going to marry would appear next to their reflection.  
  
Did it really work? That’s hard to say. The first two girls to try it ended up seeing each other. Were they meant to be, or were they just standing too close together? The third girl swore she saw the face of the boy she liked, but maybe it was just wishful thinking. You can see just about anything if you look for it hard enough.  
  
But Molly was sure that it would work for her, so she stepped up to the mirror and stared into the glass. A shadowy shape appeared beside her. The shape of a woman with her head bowed, her face obscured by her long, tangled black hair. As Molly watched, the figure slowly straightened, and its hair fell back to reveal a rotting corpse. Molly had seen the face of death.  
  
Knowing that the image in the mirror meant that she wouldn’t live long enough to be married, Molly went to see the Waste Witch to bargain for an escape.  
  
“I will grant you unending life and unending youth,” the witch told her, “in exchange for that which you value most.”  
  
In payment, Molly offered the ring from her finger, but the witch only laughed and sent her away.  
  
“That trinket is not your greatest treasure. I have already collected what is owed.”  
  
Molly hurried home. She knew that her mirror was her most valued possession. Could the Waste Witch have removed it from her room somehow? But when she arrived, there it was, hanging on her wall where it had always been. Relieved, Molly went to admire her perfect face.  
  
But when she looked at her reflection, she saw the face of a ghoul! Her sparkling eyes were milky and bloodshot. Her flawless skin was withered. Her beautiful, long black hair was falling out in patches, and as she watched, her strong Roman nose rotted and fell away.  
  
With a horrified scream, Molly ran out of the house and down the street looking for someone, anyone, to help her. But there was nothing anyone could do.  
  
From that day on, her former friends taunted her, calling her Moldering Molly whenever they saw her. It got so bad, she stopped leaving her house. Finally, one day she was found dead on her bedroom floor, cut to ribbons, lying in the shards of glass from her shattered mirror.  
  
Molly’s was the only full-length mirror in Reno, but each of her friends had a smaller mirror of her own. It was only a matter of days before the first was found, her mirror smashed to pieces in her hand, and her face sliced off...and nowhere to be found.  
  
The others followed, one by one. Some believed it was the work of a serial killer, but all the girls in Reno knew that it was Molly Caslet, back for revenge against the friends who turned against her.  
  
And to this day, if you can find a mirror still in one piece, if you stare into it by the light of a single candle and call Molly’s name three times, she may appear. Call for Molly Caslet, and there’s a chance she’ll offer you her help, especially if you’re looking for revenge against someone who’s done you harm. But if you call for Moldering Molly, she’ll take your face instead.  
  
And you have to be careful, because even if you’re nice, she might just decide to kill you anyway. Especially if you’re a beautiful woman with long black hair.


	7. Campfire Interlude

None of the people at the fire is a black-haired woman. And none of them owns a mirror. The story still leaves them silent until Razz finally asks, “Did the lesbians get together before they got murdered?”  
  
“I don’t know. The story’s not really about them.”  
  
“Just seems like she could have waited to see how that shit turned out before she went out and sold her soul or whatever.”  
  
“It made a lot more sense than your story!”  
  
“The more important question,” Poindexter interrupts, “is, did you or did you not succeed in frightening O’Hanrahan?”  
  
“Oh, it was scary all right,” says O’Hanrahan. “Telling the future from a mirror is witch business. The Good Lord don’t like such things.”  
  
“But that wasn’t the scary part!” Mags slumps in defeat. “I guess it’s your turn, big guy. If we can’t scare you, maybe you can scare us.”  
  
“Oh, no, I’d rather not. I don’t think I could tell a story about witchcraft and bloody murder.”  
  
“Make it a ghost story,” Poindexter suggests. “You don’t have to put in anything you find objectionable.”  
  
“Is it all right it if’s a true story?” O’Hanrahan asks.  
  
“If it’s a ghost story, it’s not likely to be true.”  
  
“Well, I don’t know about that. All I know is what my pa told me happened to him.”


	8. O'Hanrahan: Four Knocks

“My Great-Gram O’Hanrahan was a widow living all alone, and she was getting up in years, so her son, my Paw-Paw, brung her home to live on the farm with him and his kids, him being a widower, too. My pa was the youngest, and Gram just doted on him. He’d set and talk to her when she was feeling poorly, and she always declared he did her a world of good. Her health wasn’t good, you see. Her boy thought he’d brought her home to live, but she knew she’d come home to die.  
  
Well, there come a time when Paw-Paw had to go into town, so he took his oldest, my Uncle Eamon, and left Pa and Aunt Tallulah to mind the house. This was in the dead of winter, and the snow started falling the minute they set out. But it was nice and cozy in the house.  
  
Gram was having one of her bad spells, so Pa sat up with her after ‘Lulah went to bed. Gram would get confused sometimes and think she was in another time and place. She’d ask where her mama was, or call Pa by the name of her little brother that died of winter fever. The spells always passed, and she wouldn’t remember nothing about them later, so he learned to go along with her when she started talking strange.  
  
That’s what he thought was happening when she took him by the hand and said, “Boy, when he gets here, don’t you let him in.”  
  
Imagine his surprise when, not five minutes later, there come a knock on the door.  
  
He figured Gram must have been expecting a visitor, and it had slipped her mind. But why would she want to leave them out in the snow to freeze? He went to ask her, and she told him, “Don’t you open that door!”  
  
Pa didn’t like to turn away no one looking for shelter, but he’d been taught to obey his elders. So he went to the door and shouted through it that he was awful sorry, but he couldn’t let them in, and would they mind staying in the barn until his pa got home in the morning?  
  
There was no answer. He reckoned the visitor weren’t too happy with the arrangements, but since they didn’t give him no argument, he figured they must have gone off to sleep with the brahmin, where at least it was nice and warm.  
  
He went back and sat by Gram a while longer. She was asleep by this time, and he thought he ought to be, too. But just then, there was another knock at the door. Louder, this time. Impatient-like.  
  
Pa got up and went to talk to the visitor. He still wouldn’t let them in, even with his gram sleeping too soundly to tell him no. But he said to them, if they was thirsty, there was a pump out back, and if they was hungry, there was some dried fruit stored in a barrel, and if they got cold, there was plenty of blankets in the barn.  
  
They didn’t answer. Pa thought they must be awful mad, and he was sorry for it. But he went back to sit with Gram some more, because that was all he could do.  
  
But as soon as he sat down, there come a loud banging at the door that seemed like it’d knock the whole house down. At that, Gram opened her eyes and said, “Oh, all right. I s’pose he’s waited long enough.”  
  
So Pa went to the door to let the visitor inside. But the snow had been coming down, and it had got so cold the knob iced over and froze the door to its frame. There he was, straining and struggling and cussing the weather, and then the stranger knocked one more time. Rattled the door so hard it almost knocked him off his feet.  
  
“I’m lettin' you in!” says Pa. “Just wait a dang minute!”  
  
Just then, the door goes flying open, and Pa falls slap on his back as this icy wind blasts its way into the house. But when he sits up, there’s no one there.  
  
The moon was full, and clear as day he could see that there was not one single footprint in the snow.  
  
When he went to check on Gram, she was stone dead. And ‘Lulah had slept through the whole ruckus.  
  
Now, that might sound like the end of the story, and for years Pa reckoned it was. Life went on and the young ‘uns grew up. Paw-Paw died real sudden, and Eamon went right after. ‘Lulah married the minister and moved to town, and Pa inherited the farm. Soon he brought home a pretty young wife, and about a year later is where I come in.  
  
Ma was having a real hard time with the birth, and after a while when things didn’t seem to be going right, Pa got anxious and sent for the doctor. He went and sat by Ma and did what he could to help her, and before too long a knock came at the door.  
  
Thinking nothing of it, Pa called out, “We’re in the back room, Doc!”  
  
But the doc didn’t come.  
  
A minute later, he heard the knock again.  
  
Pa ran to the back door, but there was no one there. And that’s when he realized the sound was coming from the front door. The door he didn’t use no more than he had to. The door he’d opened the night Gram died.  
  
In all the years since then, Pa had grown tall enough to see the window in the top of the door. We weren’t near rich enough to put glass in our windows, so they patched the hole with oilcloth in winter, wax paper in summer. Looking through the paper, Pa could make out the shape of someone, or something, standing at the door, leaning forward to peer in at him.  
  
The visitor knocked again.  
  
Pa ran up to the door and yelled out, “You get out of here! There’s nothing in here for you!”  
  
And from the other side of the door, a voice said, “Are you sure?”  
  
Looking back later, he didn’t know what came over him. But he  _had_  to open the door.  
  
Because that voice belonged to Gram.


	9. A Campfire Ending

“But obviously your mother didn’t die, since she went on to give birth to twelve more children,” says Poindexter.  
  
“Not quite that many,” O’Hanrahan says gently. “And no, she didn’t die. When Pa opened the door, he didn’t see a thing except the doctor coming up the road. They soon put my ma to rights. But around that same time, my Aunt Tallulah was laid up with the blue flu. The hour I was born, she fell into a deep sleep...and never came out of it.”  
  
“Was there a knock at the door?”  
  
“I don’t know. Her husband never said. Pa never asked.”  
  
“Shit.”  
  
The four squadmates stare into the fire. The idea of having walls around them is an appealing one right now.  
  
Somewhere close by, a coyote howls.  
  
Three of them should be asleep. One of them should be on watch. But no one wants to leave the circle of the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Hook-Hand" is based on numerous hook-handed killer/escaped mental patient urban legends.
> 
> "Not a Breath" is based on the Twilight Zone episode "The Grave," although I first heard a variation of the story from older kids in my neighborhood long before I knew what The Twilight Zone was.
> 
> "Moldering Molly" is based on Bloody Mary. It was only after I finished writing it that I realized I also drew inspiration from the episode "The Tale of the Vacant Lot" from Are You Afraid of the Dark, a show that was obviously influenced by The Twilight Zone in many ways. I'm sensing a pattern here.
> 
> "Four Knocks" may or may not be inspired by some specific thing. I honestly can't remember if I've read or heard a similar story, but I have definitely had recurring nightmares with similar themes.


End file.
